I always feel awful when I take just one of my dogs on a “bye-bye” trip and have to leave the other at home (even if it’s just to the V-E-T). I always feel like I have to make it up to the one who didn’t get to go with an extra treat or belly rubs when I get back home. I think that if you ask any dog owner if their dogs get jealous of other dogs (even of other dogs in their family) they would say yes. That’s exactly what Dr. Harris set out to study. What do you think? Does your dog ever get jealous when you give your attention to something else?

Inside Man’s Best Friend, Study Says, May Lurk a Green-Eyed Monster

Any dog owner would testify that dogs are just as prone to jealousy as humans.

But can one really compare Othello’s agony to Roscoe’s pique?

The answer, according to Christine Harris, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, is that if you are petting another dog, Roscoe is going to show something that Dr. Harris thinks is a form of jealousy, even if not as complex and twisted as the adult human form.

Other scientists agree there is something going on, but not all are convinced it is jealousy. And Roscoe and the rest of his tribe were, without exception, unavailable for comment.

Dr. Harris had been studying human jealousy for years when she took this question on, inspired partly by the antics of her parents’ Border collies. When she petted them, “one would take his head and knock the other’s head away,” she said. It certainly looked like jealousy.

Do dogs experience jealousy? The reactions these border collies exhibited to being petted, and being ignored, inspired new research into the question. Credit: Steve Harris

But having studied humans, she was aware of different schools of thought about jealousy. Some scientists argue that jealousy requires complex thinking about self and others, which seems beyond dogs’ abilities. Others think that although our descriptions of jealousy are complex, the emotion itself may not be that complex.

Dog emotions, as owners perceive them, have been studied before. In one case, Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist who is an adjunct associate professor at Barnard College and the author of “Inside of a Dog,” found that the so-called guilty look that dogs exhibit seemed to be more related to fear of punishment.

Dr. Harris ventured into the tricky turf of dog emotion by devising a test based on work done with infants.

When dog owners petted and talked to a realistic stuffed dog that barked and whined, the people’s own dogs came over, pushed the person or the stuffed dog, and sometimes barked. After the experiment, many of the dogs sniffed the rear end of the stuffed dog, suggesting, Dr. Harris said, that the dogs thought it might be real.

Dr. Harris also recorded what happened as the owners petted and talked to a jack-o’-lantern and read a children’s book aloud, to see if any old distraction would provoke a reaction. The dogs paid little attention to the jack-o’-lantern and very little to the book.

Dr. Harris concluded, in a paper in PLoS One written with Caroline Prouvost, also at the University of California, San Diego, that the dogs showed a “primordial” form of jealousy, not as complex as the human emotion, but similar in that there is a social triangle and the dog is trying to make sure it, not the rival, receives the attention.

Other scientists had mixed reactions to the work. Dr. Horowitz said she admired the goal but thought the researchers had not shown that the behaviors observed actually indicated jealousy.

“What can be shown is that dogs seem to want an owner’s attention when there is attention being given out,” she said. “This study confirms that.”

Sybil Hart, at Texas Tech, who has studied jealousy in infants, said she thought the research was “very well done and makes a very compelling argument.”

If one sees jealousy in babies and dogs, she said, “to some degree, it’s innate,” which would be important to know for attempts to manage human jealousy.

“Over all, trying to make it go away has not been very successful,” Dr. Hart said. “We are trying to eliminate jealousy, and scientists are saying maybe we should try to understand it better.”
Jealousy, Dr. Harris wrote in the study, is “the third leading cause of nonaccidental homicide across cultures.”

Whatever the dogs’ behavior is called, said Brian Hare, a director of the Duke Canine Cognition Center at Duke University, there are practical implications for their owners.

“Attention seeking can lead to jealousylike behavior in dogs that includes aggression in some cases,” he said. “So for dogs with suspected aggression problems, it may be important to avoid situations where they feel ignored.”

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